How Teaching Board Games Makes Me a Better Consultant

For the past two years, I’ve attended a little-known convention called Gen Con. Okay, depending on who you ask, it might not be that little-known. It draws over 60,000 unique attendees (over 200k visits throughout four days). Besides spending time enjoying everything at the convention—from visiting exhibitor booths to making purchases, trying out new games, […]

What Do Clients Need from Consultants? Options and a Recommendation

Consulting is an abstract term and open to interpretation. My interpretation is that, at its core, consulting is about listening, identifying options, identifying tradeoffs, and making a recommendation.

Overcoming Cognitive Bias for Consultants: Loss Aversion

Most people think that they tend to make rational, logical decisions. However, often, we don’t! I’d like to provide you with an overview of cognitive bias and how a well-known bias, loss aversion, can affect the consultant-client relationship.

Intro to Incident Communication for Product Managers

One sure test of any product manager’s resiliency is how she manages unplanned service outages and other types of incidents. I’m referring to events that can risk a company’s reputation, increase costs, and erode client confidence.

Five Steps for Tying Up a Project Unexpectedly Cut Short

As consultants, we always have to be prepared for the unexpected. In rare cases, the surprise can be that a project is suddenly wrapping up. This can happen for a number of reasons. It could be a clerical error in accounting that resulted in the project unexpectedly reaching the limit of its budget. It could […]

Wizard Consultant Skills – Protection Spells for Saying “No”

Atomic is home to lots of very high-level wizards. Their abilities and specialties span the whole of the software craftsmanship space, and each one has their own skill set to leverage when tackling the many unique problems that come through our door. I’m not a very high-level wizard yet, but I’ve found that deliberately striving […]

Problems Happen; How Do You Deliver the Bad News to Clients?

We’d like it if things always went smoothly, but in life, they seldom do. This truth holds for custom software projects as well—we struggle with unforeseen bugs, scope creep, a third-party integration that doesn’t work, team velocity lower than expected, projects more complex than originally thought, etc. In these situations, it’s helpful to remember how […]

Using “We” Language to Build Bonds with Clients

My wife and I typically visit family on the weekends, which involves a couple-hour drive and spending the night somewhere. She loves to have the house cleaned before we leave. That’s her goal. My goal is to leave on time. Those goals don’t line up very well unless there is a strong partnership effort.

Experiencing the Client/Consultant Relationship from the Other Side

As I near my one year AO-versary (as we affectionately call our anniversaries at Atomic Object), I have started to look back at how much I’ve grown, not just as a UX designer, but also as a consultant. I also recently had the opportunity to be a client to some other consultants: the designer and […]

Improving on the Open Office Environment with Slack

At Atomic Object, we’ve always been big fans of the open office floor plan. Our offices consist of wide-open rooms with table groups where team members can easily work together. This environment allows spontaneous brainstorming sessions and problem-solving discussions to occur naturally throughout the day. One thing that I really love about the open office setup […]

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Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

Maker-Client Communication